Improve your website speed with these tips and tricks

You had a great website created and it was nice and fast. But over time, it slowed down. It won’t be news that a slow website is one of the biggest conversion killers. That’s why it’s important to keep your website optimized for speed. This is something we get right during construction, but should remain a focus for you even after that. Easily test your website via Google’s PageSpeed Insight to see what the status is.

Not satisfied with your “speed score“? Below I share some tips for recognizing and solving problems.

Reduce media before uploading

A major problem with websites that have been online for a while is the amount of (large) media that is added. It is very wise not to make any image uploaded larger than absolutely necessary. That is on the one hand making sure that the dimensions (amount of pixels wide x high) are not too large, on the other hand that the file size in mb’s is small. Use a tool like Free Convert to convert your images into WebP files. That will save a lot in your page speed. I have an additional tip, use this free plugin to convert everything to WebP in one go.

Want to upload video? Then use a compression tool like Handbrake to reduce your video in mb’s. You will see that it saves significantly without sacrificing quality. I use it for every video and it really works wonders.

Don’t make pages too long

A website is alive and that means new content is coming online. This is good for your visitors and for Google. Keep arranging content logically in your website and try not to put everything on one very long page. Large pages take longer to load, which is not very nice for your visitors. Keep the structure of your website as a guideline on how to smartly organize the content you post. I use as a rule of thumb: one keyword is one theme so one page. So don’t try to combine themes on pages.

Clearing

Regularly clean up your media library and check for pages in your Web site that can go away. Throw away what is unnecessary or outdated. Think blogs, content pages and media files. Anything to keep your website small and fast. Old blogs that are no longer relevant can be quietly discarded without negatively impacting your SEO. Do you think it still has certain value? Then rewrite and update the article (then you can republish it, which is actually good for your SEO). It’s also good to regularly critically review your plugin list and discard things that are no longer important. I find that plugins are often installed to do temporary chores – throw the plugin away immediately afterward, it saves!

Minimize server response time

Your page speed is determined by what’s in your website’s code, but also, in addition, by your server. The slower your server is, the longer it takes for your page to load. One of the biggest causes of a low speed score is a slow server.

Google recommends making sure your server responds to a request within 200 milliseconds. If it takes longer, it is considered “waiting time. Having a lot of waiting time causes your speed score to be lower.

But how do you find out if your server is slow? We use GT Metrix (you have to create a free account for this) to assess what the obstacles are that slow down a Web site. You paste the URL in the box provided and within a minute the results will be on your screen. Navigate to the Waterfall tab. Here you can see if the load time is longer than 200 milliseconds and which files are causing it. Have a benchmark run by a hosting party to see what they can do for you if you feel your server response is too low.

Enable browser caching

We always install browser caching, which causes certain types of files (such as .js, .css and images) to be stored in your visitor’s browser. This means that the browser remembers saved files and checks if these saved files have changed. By using browser caching, a certain part of your website does not have to be reloaded when the visitor is back on your website. This can save a lot of loading time.

Minifying

This is a reasonable pro tip, but you can also use plugins to “minify” CSS and JS. This means you remove all unnecessary (empty) lines of code. This can impact how your website looks so handle this with care. Two plugins that can help well are Lightspeed Caching and Perfmatters. Back up before experimenting with these!

Stay active

So keeping your website speed up is an active task. When you are working on your website, you can always review these points:

1. Do a sitespeed test
2. Discard unnecessary pages or rewrite as needed
3. Check if you have unnecessary media files that can go away (and discard them)
4. Compress your media files before uploading to your website
5. Publish new content

Is your website slow and need help? Let me know and I’ll take a look with you.